


In Which Jane Has A Conversation With One Mr. Edward Rochester

by lulla_lunekjaer



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: Antoinette | Bertha cameo appearance as something threatening, F/M, I wrote this for a class lmao, Minimal editing, Pre-Relationship, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 11:39:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9321929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: I wrote fanfiction for a class againJane and Mr. Rochester have a conversation, set between Chapters 13 and 16 of Jane Eyre.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for my English IOP (15 minute individual oral presentation) the night before it was due and that's why it has such minimal editing also now my friend wants me to write Jane/Helen smut so like,,,, we'll see I wanted to include Jane/Helen undertones in this but I couldn't make it work so chances are high even though I've never written smut in my life oh well

Mr. Rochester asked me that day whether, after tea, I would join him in the drawing-room. It was a fine room, and if the fashion for drawing-rooms had changed in the last ten years, I did not know, for it looked just as the drawing-room had at Gateshead, only in rather more elegant colors. Mr. Reed had preferred bright colors, and Mrs. Reed rather drab ones, and she got her way in his death rather more than she did in his life for everything except me. 

At half-past six o’clock I changed into the black silk and made my way downstairs and through the dining-room. In the drawing-room, Mr. Rochester was still sipping at his tea. The candles illuminated his square forehead and grim face, and I thought, as I had told him before, that he could never be called handsome by any sense of the word but the slimmest. 

‘Ah, Miss Eyre,’ he remarked. ‘Come forward, be seated on the sofa.’ I did so. ‘It is about the pictures which you showed me that I have asked you here. I had showed them to a friend of mine, who would have the one of the elfish woman for his daughter Constance who is very fond of fairy stories. I told him I certainly could not give it to him, that it belonged to Miss Eyre, Adéle’s governess.’ 

Mr. Rochester looked up at me, and I did not know what to say, so I said nothing. To think that someone, a gentleman like my master, admired my work so much as to give it to his daughter! In my childish mind there could be no greater glory, no better honor. I knew in my mind that there was no comparison between my simple drawings, which were not even up the the quality of my own imagination, and the great artists whose work adorned the houses of gentlemen and nobles throughout the country. Meanwhile mine was to hang on the wall of a child’s schoolroom somewhere, if Mr. Rochester had not already told the gentleman of its ineligibility and poor quality. Still, I could not help but feel proud. 

‘He told me he would give me five pounds for it, should the governess decide to sell it to him by the time he leaves for his house at Road Wednesday. What do you say, Miss Eyre?’

‘If the gentleman is sure that my watercolour should amuse his child then who am I to object? As I told you, sir, I was happy when I painted them and I can only hope that the child Constance is as happy.’

‘Very well then,’ said he, ‘I shall add the five pounds to the sum owed you at the end of the year, unless there is some other trifle you wish to use it for?’

No, I said, there was not, and he then bid me tell him some about Aléle’s studies before I departed. She was a mediocre student at best and her English was not as good as my French, obliging me to supplement all other disciplines with her native language. To this Mr. Rochester sighed, turning to better look me in the eye.

‘Miss Eyre,’ he said, ‘while I am sure your methods are adequate, and Adéle has made much improvement, how is the child to learn to be my daughter if she does not speak the language of the country in which she now lives?’

‘Sir, if I speak to Adéle of figures or slavery and she knows only le chiffre or esclavage, how am I to teach her? She learns English and mathematics and history, and if I cannot teach her to understand what I teach then I am a poor governess indeed. She will learn her English, sir, but she will learn everything else besides.’

He laughed a little then, in his grim fashion, as if he were remembering events long past, and ones which he did not care to dwell on for long. 

‘You reminded me of someone I once knew, when I was young and foolish, and yes, Miss Eyre, handsome.’

‘It must have been a very long time ago, sir,’ I remarked.

He laughed again. ‘Yes, before you were born, although perhaps you are not so young as that, nor I so old.’ He grew silent then, staring for a time at the candle which lit up a piece of red drapery by the mantlepiece. It was growing very dark, although it was not yet half-past seven o’clock, and in the darkness and the candlelight, the drapery seemed to change before my eyes, and I remembered another of Bessie’s tales, the hob or redcap who might live perform small chores, but who must never let the blood on his cap dry, else he would die. It seemed to me that I grew very tired, despite the early hour, and the drapery could have become a little man, with the red eyes and cap of a hobgoblin, peering out at me from behind the curtain, or perhaps he was the curtain. Then it seemed the apparition was not a hob at all, but a angry woman with long dirty hair and red eyes set deep in her dark face. 

‘Miss Eyre,’ said Mr. Rochester, startling me out of my dreaming. When I looked back at the drapery, the woman was gone, and the drapery just a curtain once more. ‘Before you depart, do the men in green or their queen have any message for me? They have, in the past, sent messages by such strange messengers.’

‘Why sir,’ I said, ‘As I told you before, there have not been any men in green in England for a hundred years.’

‘And their queen, Jane, what of their queen?’

‘She was the last to leave, I am sure, sir.’ 

‘No, you are wrong,’ said he, ‘for how can the queen have left when she sits before me?’ 

‘You have mistaken me for someone else, sir, for I am but a mortal maid.’

‘Tell me, then, Miss Eyre, what do mortal maids such as yourself do on moonless nights such as this? They dance, I suppose, with their little friends all in a row?’

‘I shouldn’t know, for while I am a mortal maid, I have been an inmate all of my life, and inmates know even less of dancing then the good folk do. They can teach, and paint a little, but they do not know how to dance.’

‘What!’ he exclaimed, sitting upright in his chair. ‘Never in your own home!’

‘No, sir, never.’ I replied. 

‘It is a lonely feeling, then, is it not, Miss Eyre, to be someplace one does not belong? Enough to drive one mad, I would imagine. Enough to cause one to-’ and he broke off, leaving his lasts words hanging between us. ‘It is no matter. You must away now, Miss Eyre, or you will not have time for your fairy rituals before the day breaks! Away with you!’ 

‘I’m neither one of the green men’ I told him, ‘nor their queen, but I will do as you wish,’ and I rose and left him to his devices.


End file.
